Way back, one of our readers begged for an iPhone LoJack solution. He wanted his iPhone to "call home" regularly in case of loss or, let's be more realistic, theft. Over the past week, I finally had a chance to give this request some time, and I put together findme. It's a command-line program that returns the location of the cell phone tower nearest to your iPhone. When run, it tells you the tower id, plus its latitude and longitude courtesy of Google Maps.

Still, how to get the location report to a place you can get it... but nobody else can... and without receiving a zillion SMSes? For this part of the puzzle, enter Twitter. Twitter dev Britt Selvitelle helped walk me through the setup for a private account that allows your iPhone to phone home but keeps the location data relatively secure.

To do this, create a new Twitter account just for your iPhone (it will need its own unique email address, separate from your main account, so have one handy). Open the Settings panel, and look for the "Protect My Updates" checkbox. It's towards the bottom of the page, just above the Save button. Check this and click Save. With protected updates, only the Twitter users you approve will see the updates for this iPhone-only account (just you? you + spouse? spouse, kids, and "special friends?" Up to you).

Update: I've put an updated version of findme (findme-better) into the TUAW folder on my site. Please let me know if this works better for location for you. To use, just copy to your iPhone (you may have to use Firefox if you get errors after downloading with Safari), rename to "findme" and replace the original findme.

This particular post won't be near as in-depth as one Erica might do (she knows way more about the iPhone than I) but I just wanted to share my first impressions of the new Google Maps functionality on the iPhone after today's 1.1.3 software update. Granted, some would call me crazy for updating such a critical piece of equipment as my iPhone during a busy time like Macworld. But hey, let's live on the edge, shall we?

Throwing caution to the wind I made the leap and charged ahead with the update. Before I go on let me mention that I have the most vanilla iPhone out there with no hacks or custom anything (not even ringtones) so the update was a smooth process for me. In and out in under five minutes. Once done and restarted I began to explore what had changed. One of the first things I really wanted to try out was the new maps functionality.

Fortunately, an opportunity put the new Google Maps through its paces presented itself immediately; I had to join my fellow TUAW crew at a Macworld party, but all I had was the address with no idea how to get there. Which direction should I go, and how far? Fortunately, these questions were no match for the iPhone's new maps functionality.

To do this I first clicked on the Google Maps tool on the iPhone and then on the brand new button in the lower left corner of the screen (looks somewhat like a target crosshair) and waited a few moments while my iPhone triangulated my position using nearby cell towers. Impressively, it located my position almost exactly, and displayed it on the screen. Next, I pressed the directions button and in the new window I saw that next to "Start" was "Current Location" -- obviously where I was at the moment -- and below that I entered the address of where I wanted to go.

Once done I pressed the 'Route" button and in about five seconds was presented with a detailed route to my destination complete with a purple line on the map to follow. I admit when I first heard about this feature in the 1.1.3 update I was a bit skeptical about how well it would work. I'm happy to report that, at least in this first-impressions situation, it performed exactly as advertised. Although, I guess I should have expected that from an Apple product. They do seem to pretty much always turn out well.

UPDATE: OK, we fixed the title.

I did some traveling this summer (with two toddlers, so don't be envious). Certain that I'd need to conduct a search or two, I bookmarked my destinations on my iPhone, and you can do the same. Just follow the steps:

1. Launch Google Maps.
   
2. Enter the zip code of your destination city.
   
3. Once it has been found, create a bookmark.
   
4. Repeat for each stop you'll make.

Now, when you're jonesing for a venti iced green tea latte in a strange place, simply launch Maps, click Bookmarks and then your location. You'll be sippin' in no time.

In the iPhone Google Maps application, it's pretty obvious how to zoom into maps. You double tap the screen. The map readjusts, zooming further in. So how do you zoom out? Sure you can pinch your way back but there's a far easier way. Use a single multi-touch tap instead. That is, tap with two finger at once.

Separate your fingers so it's clear that you're making two contact points and...tap. Google Maps obediently zooms back out, one zoom stage for each multi-touch tap. Give it a try. It's a great tool to bring into your Google Maps vocabulary.

The iPhone offers three special kinds of links that receive special treatment. Each of these links can appear in Safari or in your mail. When clicked, they tell the iPhone to launch a specific application to handle them.

The first, the mailto: link, you're probably already familiar with. It's just like the Web-based mailto: link that's been in use for the last decade. When clicked, it opens your iPhone's email application, creates a new message and addresses it to the target of the link, e.g. mailto:sjobs@apple.com.

The second link is tel:. As you might guess, it opens the iPhone's calling application and calls the number used as the link's target. This allows Web developers to add "call us" links in their web page that, when tapped, actually place a call.

The third kind involves Google Maps. Instead of opening Google Maps links in Safari, they automatically open in the iPhone Maps widget instead. It doesn't matter whether you click them in Safari or Mail. The iPhone recognizes the link and launches the Maps widget for viewing.

Thanks iDan.

Activation

• Readers at TUAW and across the web are reporting all sorts of activation problems, and I'm truly sorry to hear about it, but I might have some tips that could help get your iPhone on its feet. As I recall, iTunes gave me an error message during the activation process, but the iPhone still kicked me back out to the home screen once it was done, and I received the standard 'your phone is activated' email a couple minutes later. I immediately was able to receive a phone call, and SMS and make an outbound call. I was also an existing AT&T customer, so all I had to do was add the $20 iPhone Data Plan during the process. I'm not trying to brag here, just provide context; by my rough calculations, existing AT&T customers seem to be having less problems than those who are first signing up or porting over service, as those operations probably entail a bit more work in the back-end on AT&T's part.
• There are a couple tricks that might help here: First, some owners are reporting that simply soft resetting the iPhone (hold the power button at the top of the phone for a few seconds to receive the power off slider) and then booting it back up fixes the issue. Just for the heck of it, why not wait a few seconds or even up to a minute? It couldn't hurt, and it might work some network voodoo to wake AT&T up and get your iPhone rollin'.
  
• I honestly don't know about this one as it is simply an idea I had, but: if you have a second Mac or PC lying around with the latest iTunes 7.3 installed, you could try plugging it in to see if the activation process begins again. However, remember: this is just an idea I had, and I have no idea whether that will illicit any results or get your activation process even more borked up on AT&T's books. I honestly don't believe it could do any damage, but I certainly am no AT&T activations engineer either.
  
• This is another theory that I haven't seen tested or mentioned anywhere, so take this one with a grain of salt as well: If you're an existing AT&T customer with a SIM card in your current (or - hopefully - soon to be replaced) phone, you could try swapping out the iPhone's SIM card as outlined in the iPhone User Guide (not included with the phone itself). Simply open that in Preview and search for SIM; your first result should be a guide for removing the SIM card and inserting a new one. Then plug your iPhone back into iTunes to see if a new activation process can begin. Again: this is just a theory; I haven't tested or heard anyone try this as a solution for activation problems.
• Update: More readers are reporting that turning off your old phone before activating the iPhone might help with activation issues. While this tip won't do you any good if you're already caught in the limbo of AT&T's activation system, it might help if my idea of re-trying activation with a different computer is worth anything.

EDGE

• It's surprisingly fast. The best speed test I've found so far for Safari on the iPhone is dslreports.com/mspeed, offering a really scaled down page with a few download size options and no-nonsense results. I'm getting, on average, about 150 kbit/sec downloads on my phone. In light of the drawbacks of EDGE's (traditional) speed, the only reason that makes sense as to why Apple and AT&T didn't make some massive announcement of a network upgrade is that they're getting hammered this weekend with iPhone activations and people tinkering around with surfing via EDGE. If they're going to announce this at all, waiting until maybe sometime next week makes sense as the iPhone storm might be dissipating to more manageable levels where most users will see this increased speed across the country. Of course, this is just speculation on my part, but the tests don't lie: users across the nation are reporting that EDGE has upgraded from its previous 20 kbits/sec speed to anywhere from 100k - 200 kbits/sec. This is great (unofficial) news.
• Call me crazy, but I think YouTube is serving up different movies based on whether you are viewing via Wi-Fi or EDGE. I've watched three separate videos via both wireless methods, one of them user generated with crummy equipment to start with, and I swear I see a higher quality version over Wi-Fi than when watching with EDGE. Whether this means there are literally two separate files encoded at different qualities or if YouTube is working some streaming + compression magic I have no idea, but I would love to hear other iPhone users chime in on this one.
• Google Maps usually impresses me with its speed when viewing satellite images over EDGE. Simply viewing the standard map and searching for a location is almost always snappy over EDGE (sometimes there seems to be a delay, but not often), and even downloading satellite imagery is usable.

Google Maps

• This was probably demoed and I just don't remember, but I'm talking to enough iPhone owners who didn't know this that I felt it warranted a mention: you can pinch to zoom in and out of either Google Maps views. This is fantastic.
• Traffic reports are usually pretty snappy, again even over EDGE.
• The Bookmarks feature of Google Maps (accessible by the blue book in the address bar) is a great way to save frequently used routes and quickly get at the addresses of contacts.
• At first I was slightly disappointed that I can't hook the iPhone's Google Maps up to my actual Google Account, but after exploring that Bookmarks feature, I deem it a non-issue, at least for me.

Mail, selecting and deleting items

• Some readers are asking about doing operations like deleting more than one Mail message at a time. While you can slide your finger across any single message to invoke that red delete button for just that message, hitting the Edit button at the top of any message list will invoke red buttons to the left of every message in the list. While this isn't exactly the same as holding the Command key on a Mac, selecting a bunch of messages and hitting the delete key once to trash them all, this is the quickest way I can find to perform large deleting operations.
• This seems to be the UI for any situation where you have a list of items that can be deleted; there's no way to select a few of them at random and hit one delete key - instead, you enable a 'delete mode' which makes it easier to delete more than one message, but still one at a time.
• I'm slightly disappointed at the lack of the 'One Inbox to Rule Them All' like Mail in Mac OS X has; if you have more than one account synched to the iPhone, you have to drill down into each account's inbox to view any new messages, drill back out to the accounts list and then drill back into a new account and inbox to view that account's new messages. It's clunky, but it's also becoming inspiration for me to consolidate email accounts.
  

That's about it for now. Like I said, stay tuned for those more in-depth posts on individual features, but in the meantime, I hope everyone's activation problems can get solved soon.

Stuck with your current smartphone for the remainder of your service contract? Tied in with business? Just can't wait 'til June 29th to get some of that iPhone-y goodness? No worries: Andy Ihnatko has you covered. In his Thursday column for the Chicago (go Cubs!) Sun-Times, Andy lists numerous ways to turn your multi-touchless Phone of Yesteryear into a genuine 'iFaux.' Included in the list are apps like Pocket Tunes (music app), Pocket Player (video app), Opera Mini (browser app), Google Maps (uh, map app), and a swanky service called SimulScribe that gives you a psuedo-Visual Voicemail feature, sending your voicemails to you as text (plus an audio attachment) via e-mail.

Check the fully skinny, and enjoy Andy's trademark humor, in his full article on the Sun-Times site.

Getting organized is all the rage lately, what with an endless sea of GTD apps, todo Dashboard widgets and Growl alarm systems. There is certainly something to be said about making a list and checking it twice - especially when your list offers Google Maps in a mouseover popup window, a Dashboard widget, individual alarms, syncing across Macs, iPod exporting and much, much more.

Listz is just such an app, and it is absolutely slammed with features. It even offers backup burning to disc, tabbed lists, extensive styling options, drag and drop support, categorizing list items, and support for printing lists if you aren't bringing your little white or black (or green, or red...) sidekick. But all this functionality comes at a price that is likely to appeal only to the power list'ers in the crowd: Listz sells for $39.95. It isn't the cheapest organization app I've ever seen, but it very well might be one of - if not the - most functional, especially with those slick rich media mouse-over popups.

The only way to tell for sure, of course, is to download a demo for yourself and try it out.

Meander, which has just hit version 1.5, is an interesting little application that lets you mark out routes on digital maps. For example, you can download maps from Google Maps or Yahoo Maps (though you're not limited to these) and then plot your own route rather than depending on the automated routing (particularly useful when you're on foot or bike). The main interface window is a translucent "Acetate", which you position over a map in a browser window (or even a PDF). You then click the snapshot button to capture the map, and draw your route. By positioning a movable scaling bar over the map scale, Meander will be able to calculate the total distance of your route, or merely the distance between any two points on the map. With Meander it's very easy to calculate distances for walking or to plot particular routes on a map which you can then save as an image file or print out. New in version 1.5 are image attachments for your route, a journal feature, and more.

Meander is $19.99 and a demo is available.

[Via MacMinute]

One of the things that had us sitting at the edge of our seats during the iPhone introduction was Google Maps integration. Now Mad4 Mobile Phones reports that the Vodafone may scoop Apple on the phone front. According to the article, their mobile version of Google Maps (available as a Java download) will offer "easy to use maps and listings of local restaurants as well as other attractions and services." Yes, but will you be able to pinch the displays to zoom them? I think not. Clearly Google has made a big commitment to mobile information access and the iPhone, as well as Vodafone, are just part of the big picture. Windows Mobile and PalmOS users can already use Google Maps on their mobile device, as you can see at the bottom of the Google Maps Mobile page.

Here's something I've been wishing the Nikeplus.com site to implement itself: integration with Google Maps. Not ones to wait around for giant companies to switch on niche features, a small software company by the name of Gordian Labs has created the Runometer, a not-quite-even-beta mashup that lets you view and compare your Nike+ running data, as well as plot out your runs on Google Maps. By providing software and/or instructions for Mac OS X, Windows and even Linux, Nike+ owners can upload their run data, sketches of their routes or even GPS data for the ultimate in geek running goodness. A handy how-to guide is provided to help you get on your feet, but you'd better get moving - Runometer users have already ran over 1000 miles and plotted 284 routes!

[via Engadget]

Bless those brave Mac folk, who I assume have lots of free time, that delve into the source of Apple's applications to see what they can see. A MacTelChat forum user took a spin around iPhoto and discovered that it can hold GPS data for images. This isn't anything new, granted, but when combined with the fact that they found both a reference to Google Maps and a hidden button labeled 'Show' in the info pane of a picture - let the rumors commence.

Could this signal the much speculated partnership between Google and Apple?

The Google Maps Plugin for Address Book has updated to version 2.5, adding Universal Binary super-powers and a slick new feature: Google Earth support (which is handy, since Google Earth just went Universal, too). Also in this new version is a true-blue Apple installer package (no more digging around in Library folders), support for Europe and new localized Google Maps domains, and user can now choose their preferred default country in the Google Maps Preferences.

This plugin is available from Brian Toth's site, and surprisingly is still donationware. Toss the guy at least a few bucks if you find his hard work useful, couldya?